::blowmage::

At work I'm on Windows and behind a proxy server. I recently wiped my workstation and started over. After I installed Ruby I found the gems command not working, again. The reason is that my proxy server requires a username and password, and open-uri doesn't pass them. (Supposedly because keeping your username and password in an environment variable isn't secure, but at work I don't care as much about apps snooping my environment variables.)

To get things working I had to hack up open-uri a bit. So I found the following code in C:\ruby\lib\ruby\1.8\open-uri.rb

  require 'net/http'
  klass = Net::HTTP
  if URI::HTTP === target
    # HTTP or HTTPS
    if proxy
      klass = Net::HTTP::Proxy( proxy.host, proxy.port)
    end

And I make the following change:

  require 'net/http'
  klass = Net::HTTP
  if URI::HTTP === target
    # HTTP or HTTPS
    if proxy
      # Add proxy user and password to work with the proxy server. 
      klass = Net::HTTP::Proxy(proxy.host, proxy.port, proxy.user, proxy.password)
    end

Then I create the http_proxy environment variable with the value of http://blowmage:s3cr3t@proxy:8080 and I'm good to go. Well, I have to log off and log back in for Windows to find and RubyGems to use the new environment variable. Oh, and be sure to create it as a user variable and not a system variable. :)